


white winter hymnal(s)

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, domestic shit, iwtb era, the longest winter/xmas vignette fic known to man!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 17:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9000709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: 12 years (and 12 days) of Christmas.





	

 

 

**December 12th, 2004**

There will be many winters the same in this house: early snow, early dark.

Part of her likes it, the way the shadows creep up over the snow, like the house is hiding with them. But it doesn’t keep her from going through the house with medical school taught precision and turning on every light as soon as the sun sinks behind the trees at the far end of their property line. Making rounds. The hiss-fizz of new lightbulbs follows her as she flips switches and pulls chains. Mulder calls this the lighting of the lamps, teases about the electric bill, but she knows he would never deprive her of their well-earned light.

She leaves the lamp near the couch for last, so she can throw herself dramatically onto the cushions when she’d finished. Only when the new-old house is all but humming with Ben Franklin’s man-made glow, does she realize how goddamn cold it is.

They’d bought the house in late spring, when the idea of a “finicky” (the relator’s word) heater hadn’t seemed like a real problem. Or if it had, she had forgotten it along with a dozen other things (like the relator’s name) when Mulder dragged her out to the porch to “talk it over” and instead had kissed her until she told him they had to either buy the house or never come to this part of Virginia again for fear of being accused of defiling someone else’s home.

She’s remembering now though – the problems with the heater, not the relator’s name (Barbara? Betsy?) – and wishing stupidly for Mulder to come back so she can use him as a man shaped electric blanket instead of getting up to find the real one. The biggest problem with living on five acres of land in Bumfuck, Virigina was that the nearest Safeway was not nearby at all. The man, as he’d explained to her earlier, had warm drink needs that simply were not going to be met by her varying selection of tea. He’d gone in search of hot chocolate. And now she is cold.

It is, she decides as she gets up (not to get the blanket, that would be like admitting defeat) to pull the drapes away from the window, not the biggest problem she’s ever had. Since they bought the house she’s been pretending most their problems don’t exist, actually. She’s looked into jobs after long conversations on payphones with Skinner alerted her it was probably safe enough to do so. But for now, for just the rest of this year, she has very little intention of doing anything more than unpacking boxes and using Mulder as a blanket. Willfully refusing to consider anything akin to the end of the world or of its ilk. Worrying over silly, mundane things like how far the grocery store was from their (their) house. Lighting the lamps.

There is old snow on the ground outside, fading into a slick grey sludge on the driveway. Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby both wish for snow on the TV and she thinks this is not at all what they were singing about. Still, the wind shakes the thinnest branches of trees until they drop the last bits of clean white in tiny, recycled snowstorms. She’s always found winter in the context of Christmas to be more palatable than late January or the dredges of March. She thinks they’ll get a tree. In her mind, the days after Thanksgiving are always advent calendar style. Some quiet, gentle countdown even though she knows this Christmas, like the two before, will not let her see her mother or her brothers. Maybe next year or the one after.

For now, a tree.

Mulder turns up just as she’s making peace with the prospect of having to venture upstairs and drag the warmest blanket off their bed to wrap around herself like a cape. How he’s managed to get instant hot chocolate mix all over his coat between the car and the door is beyond her. He shakes his hair like a dog. Says, “Hey, Scully?” before seeing her over the back of the couch. Tiny, recycled snowstorms all over the entryway carpet. She smiles so big she thinks it might produce its own electricity.

“ – and I thought, well, I should at least check if this kind has mini-marshmallows before I park because I would have to go back if it didn’t. I mean, I would have to. But it was too dark to read the package so I decided to just open it up and do you know how hard these fuckers are to open? I mean -- ”

He’s dropped the grocery bag in the corner and she can tell from the lack of noise it made when it hit the ground that it really is only filled with Swiss Miss boxes. She thinks about the grocery list on the counter but doesn’t have the heart to tell him that they don’t even have whipped cream. Or milk, for that matter. She sits up on her knees and rests her elbows on the back of the couch, waving him towards her with one hand.

“Anyways, now I have this weird hot chocolate dust all over me but it turns out that this kind does have mini-marshmallows.” He swipes at his sweater, his jacket. “Or that’s just snow. I can’t really tell.”

He doesn’t even look up at her until she’s got a hand on him and by that point he’s already screwed. She gets a fistful of his Swiss Miss dusted sweater and tugs at him until he’s close enough to wrap her arms around. He lets a smile glance across his lips.

“Did you miss me?”

She pulls back, enough to look at him and twist her fingers into his collar like she’s going to kiss him. She quirks her head. “No, I just wanted hot chocolate.”

She yanks down hard with the hand on his collar and he gives her a brief stunned look of betrayal before he’s falling over the low back of the couch with her.

“Nope,” she says as he tries to shift to the side, take his weight off of her. “Move and you’re dead, hot chocolate man.”

He lifts his head to smile at her. The fact that she let him touch her at all, not to mention manhandled him on top of her, while covered in hot chocolate mix seems to signify something but he can’t figure out what. She runs her hand through his hair in the wrong direction and he dips to kiss her collarbone.

“Jesus, Scully,” he says when he makes contact with her skin. “You’re cold.”

She pulls him closer, until she can smell Swiss Miss’ Simply Cocoa on him and then she laughs.

“No,” she says. “I’m not.”

She tells him she wants a tree and he doesn’t argue. Not that she thought he would, when she’s got him absolutely trapped against her and he loves her and all that. Not when he went to the store and really truly only came back with hot chocolate and she didn’t even care. Not when he already let her light the lamps.

  
  
**December 13th, 2005**

The lamps are all turned off, if that’s even what you can call it. The whole house had made a sighing sound when the power went out, and Mulder’s hot chocolate had gone cold while they scoured the house for candles.

“Cold. Cold hot chocolate. I don’t know that much about the Bible, but it feels like that’s a sin.”

She wrinkles her nose at him, shaking out a match as it burns towards her finger and dropping it on the kitchen table. “I don’t know how you drink that fake crap anyway, Mulder. It cannot possibly be good for you.”

He frowns at her in the candlelight. The kitchen smells like pine and holly – a half-burned candle her mother had sent them last Christmas. “It tastes like childhood.”

The wind outside presses hard against their unyielding little house. Mulder had once tried to explain to her the mythology behind a Westward wind and the good (or bad?) will it carried with it. She can’t remember the details now.

She drops onto the wooden chair across from him, her skeletal muscles easing into a sitting position. Residency is cold, long work in white-washed hospital halls. She thinks sometimes she is too old for this and many other things. Mulder reaches across the table to play with her fingers.

“It tastes like dipotassium phosphate, which is used in fertilizer.”

He smiles and it warms the room like the glow of the candle. “Ooh, Scully. Say that science word again.”

She nudges his ankle with her foot under the table because rolling her eyes has less effect in half-light. Their living room is gaping dark beyond the kitchen’s glow, dying flames in the fireplace sending out brief cries for help in the form of cracks and hisses. Last year, they got their tree too early and it was bone dry and drooping by Christmas. Mulder had wrapped a blanket around it in some parody of Charlie Brown, but there was part of her that was sure he thought it was actually going to help save the poor thing. They’d wait longer this year. It was really too early for them yet to have traditions.

Mulder leaves his cold hot chocolate mug (something he’d gleefully stolen from a diner somewhere in Tennessee – The Only Ten I See Diner – with the logo chipping off the too-thick ceramic) and picks up her other hand. The heater remains finicky, but is improved from last year. Her fingers are still cold.

“What did you do when the power went out? As a kid?” She thinks she remembers something about storms on the Vineyard. An outline in a story caught somewhere in the recollections of all the things he’d told her when she couldn’t sleep, her head against his chest in some backwoods motel. The way he’d said “like childhood” and the countdown to Christmas made her nostalgic, almost.

He smiles, turning her hand over in his. “This isn’t going to be like that short story, is it?”

“Which one?”

He looks up, like the title is dangling from the ceiling fan, which, she notices, could stand to be dusted. The candle between them has a deep, heady smell when she breathes in. “I can’t remember; it was in the New Yorker in ’97 or ’98. About a couple that tells secrets when the lights go out.”

She smiles, just a little, because they do that now. “We were a little busy in the late ‘90s.”

He smiles back, but brings her cold hands to his lips. It’s always bothered him, her being cold, particularly since their mutual brush with hypothermia. The memory of it lingers in the cracks of her knuckles, the tip of her nose. Sometimes the wind outside blows the snow three directions at once and they are quietly reminded of white, stretching and testing its strength for miles upon arctic miles. They sleep closer in winter and never discuss why.

“That we were.” He pauses, considering something. “Their baby had died, the couple in the story.”

She swallows, is struck for a moment with an irrational irritation at him for bringing that up, bringing it here into their warm kitchen with her hand in his and a cracked mug on a table they bought together. She pictures a suburb, or a flat Midwestern state or a big city. Pictures a clean house and a wooden cradle. She pictures their baby, who is not dead, who is very much alive, and forces a change in emotion that feels like tugging herself the wrong direction on a carousel.

“Oh,” she says.

He squeezes her hands. He is too sorry, sometimes, and it strikes against her Catholic guilt like a match on a box. “It’s nothing, really, I don’t know why I brought it up. Just the power going out and all.”

She nods at the table. “No, it’s okay. I’m okay.” A practice in changing nouns: It’s okay. I’m okay. He’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay. A leap forward from I’m fine, a step away from the verb tense she’d used while on the run: We will be okay. Future turned present. There is a difference. “What happens in the story?”

“I don’t really remember,” he says. She knows that’s not true. He’d once told her the entirety of the first Harry Potter book almost entirely from memory. “They tell secrets, I guess. When the lights are out. They were growing apart or something.”

She nods that he should continue.

“Some of it’s dark.” He laughs. “I guess all of it literally is. They’d lied to each other a lot. I think the husband thought they were happier than they were.”

“Was it winter?”

“What?”

There is no reason for this to be important. But she asks it quiet, like it’s a secret or a stolen thing. There is no reason for it to be important, this silly story in a magazine she hadn’t read in years, not with Mulder holding her hands across the table and their second real Christmas, in a real house, coming up on them. He answers her seriously thought, lowers his voice to match hers.

“No,” he says. “It’s summer. It’s too hot in the house, which is part of the problem. They sit outside sometimes but it doesn’t really matter. Doesn’t help.”

They always slept closer in winter. She always wanted him closer when it was cold and could remember white snow on the black ground of his fresh grave. This fact of summer feels like benevolence, a story that skirted around them, left them gently behind. She stands up and puts his mug in the sink. Looks out the window over the mix of new and old snow obscuring the tree line. She comes back to the table and sits gently on his knees, drops her head against his collar.

“What happens to them?”

“They were very unhappy.”

“In the end?”

“In the end,” he sighs, like it’s made him tired. He runs a hand up her spine. “She leaves him.”

She could have told him that. She didn’t really expect different. Short stories weren’t known for their gracious exits. She’s known him such a very long time, written such a long history. He’s warm in winter.

“Tell me a different story,” she says.

“What kind of story?”

“A winter one.”

He breathes and she feels it in his chest. The candle in the kitchen burns red-gold light. She thinks the power will come back on soon, but she’ll stay where she is, let the chill seep out of her like distilled light refracting, or smoke. He breathes. She listens.  
  
  


**December 14th, 2006**

She listens to him hum some Christmas tune over the phone to her mother. Their bedroom is warmed by the new addition of a space heater, necessary after last winter’s sudden March freeze that had left her tucked under three blankets and Mulder’s arm and refusing to get out of bed to go to work until he found a way to make the room not 19 degrees. It’s eight or so, the clock across the room is too far for her to see without her glasses. She wonders if her mother is making late dinner, if this year will be the year they finally make it to her for Christmas. The year she feels safe enough bringing Mulder into the suburbs of a city that had spat them out without a second thought.

“Thank you!” Mulder exclaims, falling back onto the bed with the phone against his ear. “Your daughter kept swearing it was God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, but I knew it was Good King Wenceslas.” He turns his cheek on the covers and throws a pointed look at Scully. She raises her book higher in front of her face. He was such a smug winner.

He locates her knee over the covers and taps against her shin with his free hand. “Well, I wouldn’t say she’s exactly tone-deaf...” He laughs at something her mother says and she shakes his hand off her knee in mock indignation.

The fact that he’d insisted on calling her mother for clarification on an on-going Christmas carol identification debate they’d gotten into over dinner makes her want to kiss him. The fact that Maggie had gladly answered and was almost certainly chatting with him while stirring a pot of something or doing laundry felt inherently intimate, and so far from the tear-laced phone calls she’d made to her mother from a gas station phone booth in the middle of the desert, years ago.

She’s seen her mother every so often – brought her out to the house once or twice to see Mulder. Maggie is careful with her, like she was during her cancer, but Scully is not sick, is not dying and she sometimes wonders at her mother’s caution. Still, she is kind, has always been kind. Mulder laughs again on the phone – the number he’d dialed was to a burner they’d bought for Maggie. Just in case.

“She’s already in bed, actually,” he says, looking at Scully again. “I think this residency is tiring her out.”

He looks young, thrown haphazardly across the foot of the bed, peering at her almost upside down. She feels old with him sometimes, ancient, like nine lives already half-way through. It is a warm, lived-in feeling. She reaches for his wrist, tugs him up to rest against her stomach.

“Yeah, well, she’s stubborn.” He smiles and she flicks his chest. “She’s reading actually. Um.” He squints sideways at her book and then screws up his face. “On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals.” He pauses. “Yes, I do think you should get her a less tedious book for Christmas.”

She squints harder at the book in protest. As if to pretend she hasn’t re-read the same sentence several times. Mulder is dragging his thumb over the sharpness of her hip over the covers. The consistency of it makes her settle, like she plans to sleep through to spring.

He looks up at her with raised eyebrows and she can half-hear her mother’s question through the phone. He mouths: _Wanna talk?_ She shakes her head, yawns for emphasis. Mouths: _Tomorrow_ back to him.

“She says she’ll call you tomorrow, Mrs. Scully.” He goes red suddenly, his hand freezing against her hip. “Yes, I do plan on letting her sleep. Yes, I know she needs her rest.”

Scully drops her book to press the back of her hand against her lips to push the laughter back down into her chest.

Mulder says, “Goodnight. Thanks again.”

The phone beeps as he presses end and then thuds against the bed as he throws it to the foot. He looks sadly at her for a moment, her hand having failed at its assigned job. He hides his face against her stomach.

“Oh my god, Scully. She thinks I’m defiling her daughter.”

She laughs again, running a hand through his hair. Sometimes the fathomless tenderness she has for him is terrifying in its unfounded depths. And sometimes it is welcome, like sinking into warm waters. “Aren’t you, though?”

He lifts his head, all indignation and disapproval. “No, I am not…defiling you. That’s so crass. I wasn’t even doing anything!”

She sits up and forces him with her, onto his knees so she can move him closer and further away at will.

“Okay, Mr. Romance Novel, call it what you will.” She kisses him, chaste and quick, for the warmth in it.

He pulls her back, lingering, with intent. He was making it far too easy for her to tease him. She pushes him away, reaching over to flip off the light.

“Uh-uh. ‘Yes, I do plan on letting her sleep.’ Save the defiling for when I don’t have to work in the morning.”

Their bed is big, big enough for him to move from where he’s fallen defeated pressed against her hip but he doesn’t. She can feel him pouting. She turns into his chest and wraps an arm around him as a condolence prize. He untangles himself to crawl under the covers with her, then pulls her back. There were many things about winter in this house that she could live without. The finicky heater and unreliable power and cracking window panes were a few. This was not one of those things. More than anything else, using him as a source of warmth is something of tradition.

She’s almost asleep when it starts. He was right about residency tiring her out. He was right about the fucking Christmas song. She pricks her nails into his back, hoping he’ll stop without her having to say anything. Humming. He’s humming and it’s reverberating through his chest and it’s loud.

“Mulder,” she says, when her attempted minor stabbing gets no response. “What the fuck.”

He looks down at her, tightening his arms around her back. “Sorry. Scully, what song is this?”

She looks up, prepared to snap at him if this was retribution for insisting they sleep instead of doing anything else. But his eyes are closed, eyebrows knit in concentration. God, he’s a terrible hummer. It is, she realizes, not going to stop until she can name the song.

“Joy to the World,” she says, which is not exactly true. She can’t tell what he’s humming – if their earlier debate was any indicator she wasn’t much of a virtuoso.

He smiles, eyes still closed. He knows that’s wrong, but can’t bring himself to care. He stops humming.

“No,” she says, closing her eyes against him again. “You can keep going.”

This time it is Joy to the World. But it’s some combination of the hymn and the radio favorite. Mulder grew up half-Jewish and not religious in any fraction, but his affinity for Christmas carols seems to know no bounds. The songs merge back and forth. She thinks of forests in Florida and lyrics to the hymn. Fields and floods, rocks and hills and plains repeat the sounding joy. His palm moves over her back in some sort of heart-beat rhythm. Repeat, repeat.  
  


**December 15th, 2007**

Repeating versions of Silent Night on the radio are not precisely her idea of holy. She can remember another Christmas season in a car with him, the radio off and a ghost story hovering in the air between them. Most of that night is fuzzy, like a dream. Blood and love and loneliness. Bing Crosby on the record player. His couch on Christmas morning and late to her mother’s (her mother’s – they’d meant to go last year and she’d gotten scared last minute. Visions of SWAT teams breaking down the front door dancing in her head). She misses his gentle hauntings now, alone on the stark stretch of road leading away from the hospital.

Her hair has frozen damp around her face, her quick shower in the locker room lacking any foresight regarding the freezing temperature outside. She taps her fingers on the wheel to bring the warmth back to them. She’s late getting home but he hasn’t called. In their early years out here in no-man’s land, at the start of her work at hospital, he’d wait by the door for her like a caged thing – nervous and twitchy. She had acted like it was smothering, the five missed calls, the way he grabbed her when she stepped in the door, smelling like wood smoke and pine needles. She was only just a few minutes late, and really, he didn’t have to keep track of her like she had a curfew.

In truth, it had been somewhat relieving. If he hadn’t been there to grab her as soon as she came in, she would have had to find him and throw herself at him and she was never one for such an outright display of need. He doesn’t get nervous when she’s a little late anymore. She tells herself it’s because they’re settled, comfortable, like trees into winter or bones in aging bodies.

The gate protests her entry. The house is unlit, unwelcoming. She thinks: A dark, gothic manor. And wonders who is haunting this particular home.

She flicks a switch in the foyer when she finally gets in, makes noise while kicking off her boots and still there’s no sign of him. She leaves her coat on, still cold. There’s light under his office door – initially some sort of undelegated space that he’d quickly made his. She thinks about knocking and wonders if he’d be twenty years younger when he let her in.

He leaves her no chance to attempt to recreate history. He is the same age when he opens the door as he was when she kissed him goodbye this morning. She is glad, somehow, to see how many years they have survived together.

He looks at her for a split-second, surprised, like he hadn’t realized she was late or heard her come in. She wonders what he’d been looking at on his desktop, how deep into message boards he’d gotten and if he’d written anything.

He looks at the fine layer of snow on the hem of her pants, the crown of her head. He says, “Baby, it’s bad out there,” without any real music in it. She half-smiles. Then, as he comes closer: “Was the drive in okay? It worries me – you driving at night. With all the snow.”

She wants to ask if it does, if he’d really thought about it until she’d walked in the door. Instead she shrugs, says: “You got mistletoe.” It’s not hanging up, just lying on the coffee table and he looks momentarily embarrassed.

“I meant to hang it up,” he rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “Time kinda got away from me.”

She wants to say that it has a tendency to do that. Slip right through his fingers. Lost nine minutes; lost nine years. Etc, etc.

He’s still talking, like he’s nervous around her, or missed her but doesn’t know how to say it, which is strange. She’s only been gone the day. Lost nine hours. Relativity is a new concept for him. He’s never been able to size up feelings in the proper context, draws outside the lines. “I walked out to the tree farm a couple miles down – they said we could go over and cut something this weekend. If you want.”

She lets him have a real smile now, moving fully into the living room and shrugging off her coat. He’s been bothering her about cutting down a tree since they moved here and she’d always demurred, insisting buying one from the stand was simpler. She likes the idea of him with an axe, a killing thing, but a marked action. A cause with effect. She nods.

He’s close enough now. There is no threshold, enough does not mean enough to touch or enough to see. Just enough. Close, where she likes him. He reaches up to touch a piece of her hair. “You’re gonna get sick.”

There’s a hint of something old in way he says it. Sick used to mean dying, used to mean terminal. He says it with half as much gravity but the same concern. She had missed him in hospital rooms. She still does.

She says, “Doctors don’t get sick. Haven’t I ever told you?”

He shakes his head. There is a sadness in it she did not expect. She lets him wrap himself around her like he can shield her from the elements. She’d learned very young that nature did not abide by any laws except its own, and it’s not as though they upheld much of anything anymore. Still, she lets him. Still as in lack of movement as he holds her. Still as in for a very long time. As in despite everything.

In winter, in 1999, he’d told her something about ghost stories and the fine lines between love and loneliness and death. Big concepts, wide and deep, thematic notions. Too broad to hold inside her or fully grasp, she’d thought then, even after knowing the feeling of cancer in her bones.

Now, in winter, in 2007, she holds his hand against her chest as he kisses her the wrong way next to some mistletoe, lips against her neck, and holds all of these things inside her body. She is old enough now, in 2007, to make room. Old enough to know she will never make quite enough.  
  


**December 16th, 2008**

Enough time has passed since they started walking into the woods that she thinks they’re going to either come out the other side or find themselves lost somewhere in the middle. Mulder insists he knows where he’s going, even though they’ve only been here once before, last year.

She’s not quite sure what it is about cutting down a tree that appeals to him. They have, she thinks, spent quite enough time in forests for several lifetimes. (He reminds her that this is not a forest, it is a Christmas tree farm and they’d never found anything insidious at a Christmas tree farm). Mulder is several long strides ahead of her, an axe slung over his shoulder like some old-fashioned lumberjack. She supposes it goes with his flannel, which is old, and his beard, which is new. She doesn’t like either. The first because it reminds her of feeling fingers digging into her chest on his apartment floor, buttoning his shirt up over her sternum with her hair still wet from the shower and sleeping on his couch. The second because it reminds her that this is maybe the first time she’s seen him out of the house for more than an hour this year.

Mulder stops in front of a reaching, stretching pine that will absolutely never fit inside their low-slung living room. He looks back at her for the first time since they started walking and grins. She smiles back like a Pavlovian response, then starts to shake her head.

“Wow.”

It’s a child’s voice, a little boy’s voice, and for a second she’s sure Mulder somehow managed to regress his vocal chords to match his childlike wonder. But Mulder turns to his left to look and she realizes it was not just a child’s voice, thrown into the cold air, but a full child. A boy. Nine or ten or something like that and leaning back to look all the way up to the tree.

“Are you getting this tree? It’s so big!”

The boy glances over at Mulder and reveals the gap in his front teeth. He’s wearing an ugly red hat pulled down over his ears. She wonders where his parents are.

Mulder shrugs, unfazed by the sudden appearance of the child. “She probably won’t let me.” He gestures in her direction.

Red-Hat steps back to look around Mulder at her. He waves. “You should let your husband get this tree, ma’am.”

She smiles, tight-lipped and cold. At the hospital, she’s treating a boy she hasn’t told Mulder about. She can’t decide why that is. It’s like she’s afraid to speak his or any little boy’s name, afraid of making them solid and real and alive and under her protection.

“Hey,” Mulder drops to a crouch to see the boy better. He’s short, with light blonde hair and dark eyes. His parents must be fair-skinned, small. “Where are your parents, bud?”

The boy points back the way they came. Shrugs. “They walk slow.”

There is a fence that goes all the way around this property. A crooked one, snow covered. It’s acres long, but feels constricting to Scully suddenly. Like she and Mulder are trapped in here where they have no right to be. With this boy and his family and a tree that would never fit inside their home.

The boy is bouncing to keep warm, distilling energy in the air around them. She feels heavy in front of him, weighed down. She’s wearing a bag on one shoulder (which is bad for her back, but she doesn’t particularly care). Inside: the car keys, the house keys, an extra scarf (Mulder’s), one black glove (hers, old), two books she’d meant to return to the library on their way home (paperbacks, very trite) and one she was meaning to give Mulder for Christmas, her wallet, two old pictures, an Arizona postcard and a phone number on a matchbox, a half-empty lipstick tube. She should have left it in the car. It feels like too much now, and silly, like she had to carry her home on her back (shoulder) or else it did not exist. Or else it disappeared. Mulder shifts the axe to his other shoulder as he stands.

The boy kicks loose snow at the base of the tree. Says, “This would be a good treehouse tree. Even better than a big Christmas tree. Do you have a treehouse?”

Mulder shakes his head, smiles again. “I don’t think we’d fit in one.” Scully tries to laugh. She is keenly aware that she hasn’t said a word to the boy. She’s too old to be like this.

Red-Hat rolls his eyes with his whole body. “No, silly, for kids! My daddy built me one two summers ago. If you had this tree in your yard you could do that. Then your kids could play in it and I could play in it with them! We live in the next town over, which isn’t too far.”

He’s just a little boy. Red-Hat with his light hair and dark eyes and moving mouth. He talks because he’s never been told not to. Scully lets the heavy bag pull against her shoulder.

“Jonathan!”

Scully doesn’t have to turn to know it must be the boy’s mother. Red-Hat’s eyes go big, like he’s been caught stealing, and he gives Mulder a guilty smile before booking it towards the voice. They turn to watch him barrel into a small blonde woman, still several yards behind them. The woman laughs. Scully resists the urge to lean against Mulder, let him hold some of the weight.

The boy’s mother waves. She’s too far to really speak to, but her voice carries. “Sorry about that! Thanks for keeping an eye on him. You know little boys, always disappearing.”

Mulder raises a hand but doesn’t smile. He looks down at Scully and she looks up. The bag is digging into her shoulder, the axe laying its weight across Mulder’s. The tree stays upright and too tall in front of them. Perfect for a tree house.

They look for a long time at each other, at the snow. At the heavy things they carry.

  
  
**December 17th, 2009**

Carrying a plate full of snowmen shaped crackers out to someone else’s dining room table is never something she imagined Mulder doing. Then again, she never imagined herself sitting in someone else’s living room and watching him carry a plate full of snowmen shaped crackers while a fire popped in someone else’s fire place and her coworker, Jean, leaned into her and said: So is that him?

Scully smiles. That was very much him. Scully, it’s me. Mulder, it’s you. That was him being almost annoyingly helpful at some silly hospital Christmas party because he never knew what to do with his hands. That was him wearing a dark green sweater she’d never seen before and trying to catch her eye through the humming circles of people. She nods to Jean and then motions him toward her. He comes quickly, relieved, like he was only sure of his purpose when she was within arm’s length.

“Mulder,” she says, letting him put an arm around her waist and kiss her cheek. It feels like they’re undercover. Aliases: Dana & Mulder (an unbalanced name, would never get by the guys in charge of crafting false identities). Normal, domestic couple. Used to socializing and being invited to dinner parties. Not exonerated only a year ago. No knowledge of hiding or the end of the world. They’re very good at it if not for the way Mulder holds her a little tighter than necessary. She doesn’t mind. “This is Jean. We work together at the hospital.”

Jean smiles, sticks out her hand. “Good to finally meet you! For a while we were convinced Dana was making you up. Are you sure you’re not just some guy she’s paying to be here?”

For a moment, she’s worried Mulder isn’t going to understand it’s a joke. Of course they all knew he existed. The way he’d come bounding into the hospital last year when the final exoneration papers came through, tracked her down mid-conversation with a nurse in the hall and spun her around until she laughed. Nothing incorporeal or make-believe loves that much, she’s sure of it.

Mulder grins back, big and real, shaking her hand. “It’s possible.”

She feels from that point on as if she’s watching them outside her body. A phenomena Mulder would call astral projecting and she would call only eating crackers and drinking too much white wine. This cannot be us, she thinks, as she watches Mulder put a hand on her knee and joke about the way she used to fall asleep on stakeouts. This is not our life, as she teases him about their first kiss and some gaggle of coworkers sighs that they’re so cute, with far too many vowel sounds.

But Mulder manages to steal her away from everyone else in much the same way he had last winter, charming her into an early summer and a sunburn out in the middle of a blue ocean. Now, he’s trapped her in the doorway that leads to a screened in porch. Outside the grey knit metal is a fractured view of a brown house, a dusting of snow. It’s strange to look out the window and see another home, another life. They are so very used to existing without context, unobserved.

“Earth to Scully,” he says. He brackets his arms on either side of her, ducks his head to worry her nose with his. “Have I told you I like this dress?”

He had, actually. He had said it so many times before they left the house that she’d decided to see if he liked it better off and then they’d been very late. The dress is wine red and velvety, with long sleeves and a low cut. Her cross shines against her chest, as if to say that despite her current entanglement (unmarried, wrapped up in the man she’s very much unmarried to), she still prays at night.

“Scully to Earth,” she says. “I’m right here.”

He smiles. “Not quite.”

She runs her hand up his sweater. Together they look like a very well dressed Christmas tree, all dark green and red. “I’m just overwhelmed,” she says. “They all love you.”

He shrugs. “You love me?” It’s not exactly a question.

She rolls her eyes, pinches at the sweater between her fingers. “Just a little.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, yeah,” he’s smiling and she gets the urge to admonish him even though he hasn’t done anything yet. “You probably wouldn’t let me do this if you didn’t, doc.”

And then he’s kissing her in someone else’s living room. And she feels like she’s watching them outside her body, cinema style, with the camera zoomed out far and mistletoe above them and the rest of the room fading to a quiet, gentle white.

Someone laughs loud. Then claps. Says: Don’t even need mistletoe, Dr. Scully!

She smiles against Mulder’s mouth. There is decidedly not mistletoe above them. They are decidedly not alone. He kisses her like they are. She comes back into her body as easy as breathing.

  
  
**December 18th, 2010**

Breathing is a pain in the ass. She tells Mulder so and coughs three times while trying to get it out. He makes a sympathetic pouting face across the couch and sits up towards her to pass her a Kleenex. She waves it away, coughs again.

“If I could breathe out of my nose, then I would blow it. Right now it’s just,” she waves her hand at her face. “Fucking useless.”

Mulder laughs, which he keeps doing even though she’s insisted that it is not funny. She sniffs sadly at him and he reaches back across the couch to pull her on top of him. She groans in protest at the forced motion. She’d woken up yesterday with chills and body aches and quarantined herself in the bedroom, telling Mulder to leave her be until her body self-corrected. Sometime this morning though, her resolve had worn thin and she’d let him sit with her on the couch. Christmas movies on the TV and a whole pile of blankets between them.

“You told me doctors don’t get sick,” he says as she settles her pounding head against his collarbone. On the TV, Frosty the Snowman dances up cyclones of snow.

“I did not.”

“Did.”

He holds up a crossword puzzle with one hand although she knows he won’t fill anything in because it would mean having to stop running his fingers through her hair with his other hand, and she’s been known to be vicious if he tries to put an end to the motion. She’d ask him to read to her instead if it didn’t feel like her head was about to explode. She watches the TV with her eyes half open, vision watery. She shivers and Mulder hums under her.

“You’re feverish, honey.”

She should pinch him for thinking he can get away with calling her that but she can’t spare the movement. Traitorous and treacherous as seems to be its nature lately, her body settles more fully into him in response. His hand keeps moving through her hair. Fevers are a strange, contradictory sensation. She can feel the heat of her own body against his, but she shivers anyways and lets him hold her tighter.

“Do you want to take your temperature, Scully?” he asks. He’s seen her sick before, she thinks. He can probably guess at her answer.

“No,” she says into his shirt. “I want you to just. Shut up, please. And do not move.”

He laughs again. Asshole. She watches the pastel snow blur of Frosty on the TV in silence the lights of their Christmas tree reflect against the screen. They hadn’t cut one down last year, but earlier this month they had. It was too skinny, misshapen. She liked it very much.

She is glad of being sick, suddenly. Of the difficulty of breathing and being able to skip the long cold drive into work. Mulder is humming along to Frosty, his hand having moved from her hair to her back. His chest is warm against her hot cheek. Frosty, for his part, is melting all over the place for the kids he loves. It strikes her as intrinsically sad, a sacrifice too big for their TV screen and a Christmas movie.

Suddenly: “Mulder.”

“Yeah?”

“Am I too hot? Am I melting you?”  
  
She starts to shift off of him and he holds her gently down. Their Christmas tree wavers and blurs in her headachy vision. He says something about her being ridiculous and needing sleep and cold medicine. Something about being willing to melt for her anytime, but she’s already given up. Fallen into him and softly further.

  
  
**December 19th, 2011**

Further beyond the house than she can see in winter is a barn that is more like a shed. Further beyond that, inside its thin pine walls, is Mulder. Chopping wood, taking inventory on the small collection Doomsday prepper supplies they keep there. She doesn’t want to think about that now. She’d burned her fingers taking a cookie sheet out of the oven because she’d been thinking about it.

Her mother expected them there at seven. She was going to California for Christmas this year and Scully couldn’t afford to leave the hospital for that long again. She’d settled for a pre-Christmas dinner, so long as Scully brought Mulder and dessert.

The cookies are dark around the edges, but edible. Reindeer and Santa shapes. She should have had Mulder help. He was better at this than she was. But their oven has always been almost as touchy as their heater. Warmth seems to travel up from the tips of her fingers right to the top of her head. She feels like she should be moving, doing. This could be their last Christmas in this house. With her mother. She feels like the heat in her could swell, send her flying. A hot air balloon gone catastrophically astray.

The front door bangs open. The smell of fresh cut wood pressing in. Mulder is humming Jingle Bells to himself. He says her name, she thinks, but she’s too busy running her fingertips under cold water to hear. Sometimes, around Christmas, she thinks of Ahab and how he’d tried to speak to her (not real, not real) from just in front of her Christmas tree. Sometimes, she thinks if she had just been able to hear what he’d said, nothing bad would have happened ever again. If only she’d just listened harder.

Mulder is behind her, suddenly. Sing-songing about going to see her mother and a white almost-Christmas. He twirls her away from the counter, bringing her burned fingertips to his lips for the most glancing of touches. He dances her softly into the kitchen, right out of whatever Dickensian apparitions she’d been contemplating.

He says, “Listen.”

She strains to hear the music he’s put on in the other room, but catches every other note. It doesn’t really matter. They’re swaying more than dancing. She looks down at herself – wearing his shirt and her sweatpants. Barefoot on the tile floor. She needs to get dressed, get ready to see her mother, but Mulder shakes his head like he can sense her thought.

“We’ve got time,” he says.  
  
His hands stay around her waist like a weighted belt. He keeps her almost-still. Keeps her on the ground.

  
  
**December 20th, 2012**

Ground Zero has become the colloquial term for the site of 9/11, but that is not precisely what it means. Ground Zero is the starting point for some activity. It is the point directly above or below the explosion of a nuclear bomb. Anything could be a Ground Zero, by the first definition. Ground Zero was their office when she met him, the starting point for years and years and years. Ground Zero was the Anasazi ruins where they became certain of the end of the world. Ground Zero was this house, and their bed, and the shy spring garden Mulder had started and their warm kitchen and all the other things that had been the starting point for a whole new kind of action. Or lack thereof. The world is supposed to end tomorrow, and they are very far from prepared.

Mulder buzzes around the house and the shed. Checks with contacts on the internet and asks if she’s discussed the plan with her mother. He had told her years ago that he wasn’t certain anymore. That there was a chance they’d been misled, lead in circles. At the time, in the new breath of spring, she’d been glad. Relieved to have an eternity with him here in this house. She is realizing now that that was the wrong assumption. That their future plans had always involved living on borrowed time. That last time they had tried to live past the world not ending, he’d left her.

“Did you double check that there was extra ammo in the crawl space?” He punctuates this question with a kiss on her shoulder as she dries a dish from breakfast.

She hums her answer.

He nods “Good.” Then adds a new phrase, one that has been in their vernacular since he’d sat her down and told her he wasn’t sure: “Just in case.”

She can feel the nervous energy coming off him in peaks and valleys. He used to get like this before a new case. Unbalanced and erratic. He’s excited, she realizes. Not afraid. He disappears into the office, muttering something about checking in with someone named Newt. She leans back against the counter, letting water from the sink spill over and onto her shirt. She used to wish for an endless life here. World without end. That is not what she wants anymore.

In the shower, she lets him talk to her about vaccines and immunity. When they’re both soap-warm and clean, he looks at her seriously, brushing wet hair out of her eyes and tells her they’re going to be okay. She knows he means alive, safe, together after the Big Apocalypse hits. She does not tell him that is exactly what she’s afraid of.

On the porch later that night, cleaning their guns: “What if nothing happens?”

He shakes his head. Looks at the killing thing in his hands. They’d done target practice out back this past summer, with bulls-eyes set up by the garden. Neither of them has fired at a living target in years. “Scully.”

“If it doesn’t,” she breathes. “Mulder, what was it all for?”

Later, she will hate herself for being the one to say it. To vocalize the thought and drop it into his head. Tomorrow he will repeat it to her, and she will understand what it means to hate yourself so completely that it feels like building your own private world just to end it every morning.

Now, he looks at her for a beat too long, helpless. She shakes her head, to erase the air between them. She says, “Just in case,” before kissing him.

They sit out on the porch and freeze. Watch the stars and say it before every declaration they make so that they cover all their bases. Just in case they don’t get to say things again. Merry Christmas, just in case. Happy early Birthday, just in case. I love you, just in case. They never discuss what kind of end they’re preparing each other for. Just in case.

  
  
**December 21st, 2013**

It’s the anniversary of nothing, which seems like an anniversary in and of itself.

She sits on the porch to wait for winter to bear down. The weather here has never abided by the solstice, but this year it has yet to snow. She watches her breath freeze in the air. She’s been trying to super glue an ornament back together and her fingers are frozen around it now. A silver stethoscope listening to a heart attached to a thin gold string – the kind of thing you could buy at Hallmark. There is a crack (not down the heart, how absolutely cliché) on the right side, nearly severing one side of the fake tool from its center. Mulder had bought it for her when they’d first moved here, when they got their first tree. The year he’d come home covered in Swiss Miss.

She’d smiled when he pulled it out of the bag with a sprig of mistletoe.

“Let me guess, because I’m a doctor?”

He’d shaken his head at her. “Oh ye of little creativity. It’s clearly because you take good care of my heart.”

She’d cocked her head at him, touched and a little caught off guard. It wasn’t like them to be so straightforwardly saccharine. Not unless one of them was dying. She was about to ask if he was feeling alright when he clarified: “You know, making me take Aspirin.”

It's broken now. Cracked from where she’d dropped it when trying to hang it up on a high branch earlier. She and Mulder used to have a system, with her leaving the top half of the tree for his longer arms and taller form to take care of. She did all of it herself this year. The star on top was crooked.

The porch light goes off automatically after she’s been still for some time. Inside, she can hear Mulder puttering around the kitchen. He doesn’t cook anymore. The microwave hums. She can’t remember if they’ve spoken today. She sits and listens to him not come looking for her. She’s stopped lighting the lamps when it gets dark.

Sometime in the past month he’d stopped sleeping in their bed, or realizing when she came home from work. She’d made some quiet resolution, out here with her breath in the new winter air. She squeezes the ornament to bring feeling back into her hands and it shifts, not quite dry. She reminds herself to leave him Aspirin before she goes. To restock the fridge and write some kind of note.

I’m sorry. Be careful. Take care of your own heart and don’t call me. Love, S  
  
Something like that.

As she gets up to go inside, turns her back on the hesitant winter, it finally starts to snow.  
  


**December 22nd 2014**

It is just a day in winter. The house is out of hot chocolate and he hasn’t noticed. She does not call.  
  


**December 23rd, 2015**

There have been many Christmases without. Without Ahab, without Melissa, without Charlie, without Emily, without Mulder, without William. Without Mulder again. Always in some degree or another, but rarely all at the same time. Without her mother.

Her apartment doesn’t have a tree. She didn’t exactly see the point. She remembers in another apartment, years ago, how Mulder had had only a single stocking, striped and hung from his bookshelf. She’d wondered who filled it or if it stayed empty all season. Just for decoration.

Skinner had sent them home early. Claiming holiday spirit and supplying a pointed look that meant he was concerned for her emotional state. She’d wanted to tell him she’d lost family members before, thank you, and that she wasn’t celebrating this year. But Mulder’s hand had been warm on the hollow of her spine into her hips and the motion had been so familiar she’d swallowed instead of speaking.

A month ago, she’d tipped her mother’s ashes into a lake not wide enough to pretend to be the ocean. After, she’d tipped her entire self towards Mulder and asked that he take her home, please, and that he not stop touching her when they get there. He’d never been able to say no to her. Their sheets had been clean and warm and she’d let him kiss her before she left the next morning.

None of these thoughts make sense all together. Except for as some sort of reasoning or rationalization for why she’s standing quietly on their porch and has been for fifteen minutes. For why she’s thinking of him touching her and of missing her mother and is too afraid to knock. She’s wearing an Oxford sweatshirt of his over her work clothes. She sits on the porch steps, just to give herself a moment to collect her thoughts, to figure out what she’s going to say to him.

Years ago, just a couple, she’d sat on the porch like this and decided to leave him. She lets her nails bite into her hand now, aware of how she could never make a lasting decision or draw enough blood to make a difference.

Her phone rings.

She sniffs. Forgets she does not live here anymore. Answers like she is not crying on the porch of a house she used to own with a man she still loves: “Scully.”

“It’s me.”

It’s him. She smiles. Wipes at her eyes and lowers her voice.

“It’s you.”

He’s quiet for a minute. She pictures him only two doors away, hunched up in his office. Like always. She hears him take a breath.

“See, it was uncharacteristically, for lack of a better word, jolly, for Skinner to let us leave early and I was thinking – what could make him feel so festive? And then I thought, well maybe he has a new girlfriend. Somebody who is really into Christmas. Alternately: Could Skinner be Santa Claus? It’s a mystery. What’s your opinion?”

She rolls her eyes like he can hear it through the phone. She’s about to ask why he really called, but it didn’t matter. She says, “I think I’d need more evidence for the Santa theory.”

He hums his understanding. Says, “Well, in that case, would you maybe like to come inside?”

She turns as the door opens, half-twisted towards him and still sitting cold on their old porch. He’s holding his phone up to his ear still, speaking into it and smiling. “This house has windows, you know. A good tool for spotting pretty red-haired ladies who seem to have forgotten how to knock.”

She doesn’t say it hadn’t occurred to her that he’d have the curtains open. That she wasn’t used to him letting light in.

Instead she stands, willing warmth into her bones. She says, “Sorry. I, uh, couldn’t sleep.”

It’s seven-thirty and snowing. Too bright out and far too early for sleep. He smiles and she can smell the candle her mother had bought years and years ago burning from behind him. Something escapes out of her as she tries to speak again, something heavy and grateful, like she has been travelling a long way and carrying unfathomable things on her back.

He says, “Scully.” Just like he used to.

She ducks under his arm to get inside.

  
**December 24th, 2016**

Inside, the lamps are burning. Scully uses her nail to open the last door on the advent calendar that Will had sent them on the first of the month. The chocolate tastes like plastic and chalk but she lets it melt on her tongue. Knowing their son is strange, like seeking a phantom limb and finding it there despite a well-remembered amputation. He’s tall, with her eyes and Mulder’s nose. Tomorrow, Christmas day, he’ll call from Wyoming and it will be its own kind of gift, his voice across the line.

The tea kettle sings on the stove and she pours the water into a cracked Tennessee diner mug. They’re out of tea and she settles for Swiss Miss. The kind with mini-marshmallows. Something about living with Mulder through too many winters has made her partial to instant hot chocolate. On the radio in the living room, Joy to the World plays soft. She can tell Mulder has fallen asleep by the lack of out of tune vocal accompaniment. She hums along instead.

Mulder sleeps a lot lately, still just on the tail end of recovery from a virus that had very nearly wiped out the population at large. At the end of it -- the panic and midnight flight to a flat dead state to meet a boy who she was sure would hate her and her tears by yet another hospital -- their house had still been standing. They’d prepped it years ago for a whole plethora of catastrophes. Just in case.

She watches the snow outside the kitchen window until everything outside fades into white noise. Like always, the clean expanse of white makes her shiver, makes her want to seek out Mulder’s generator level body heat. The music in the living room has faded into Silent Night, and she doesn’t mind. Mulder is sprawled out on the couch. She can remember coming in here months ago, after everything, and finding the house standing but the living room just the mess she’d left it when she went looking for him. They’d cleaned together, swept away shards of glass and rebuilt the dining room table.

She touches her fingers to his cheek, thinking she’ll go find her book and curl up in the chair nearest the fire. His eyes open. He traps her hand with his.

“Hi,” she says. “Merry almost Christmas.”

He smiles, kisses her palm. “Jesus, Scully,” he says, tugging her hand to make her sit by his hip, lean over him and rest her elbows on his chest. “You’re cold.”

There will be many winters the same in this house, but none just quite. Outside, it’s early evening light and there is more snow than there is solid ground. Inside, the fire burns heady and warm. There is a stillness to them, in this house, that finally feels lasting. She’s going to taste like Swiss Miss when she kisses him.

“No,” she says. “I’m not.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas writing this almost tore my family apart on Christmas eve (kidding)! 
> 
> The story Mulder and Scully refer to in 2005 is called "A Temporary Matter" by Jhumpa Lahiri. 
> 
> This timeline presumes IWTB took place somewhere in late December of 2008 or early January of 2009. I took liberties with the timing of the revival because that shit makes no sense in the first place. 
> 
> Happy holidays! Drink Swiss Miss!


End file.
